Author: Josh

When we came home from a weekend away last week, the house smelled like gas. It had been smelling faintly of gas in the past, but just in the laundry room, and mostly after we’d run a load through the dryer. I figured the dryer had a sticky valve, and that it was leaking a bit after a load. Nothing that made me concerned it was going to explode, anyway. But coming home to the smell being strong enough to notice as we walked in was alarming. So we opened the doors and windows to vent the house, and I pulled out the dryer to check for a leak between the shutoff valve and the appliance, which would be an easy fix.

Except that when I went to turn the shutoff valve off, it quickly became obvious that the leak was before that, in the floor flange fitting between the corrugated stainless steel supply line and the shutoff valve. So I ran outside and shut off the gas at the meter. And then I made what was apparently a huge mistake: I called Puget Sound Energy to report the leak. Because, you know, that’s what they tell you to do. For safety.Continue reading “More adventures in homeownership”

Back in June I sent myself a list of tunes I either wanted to learn how to play or just liked a lot. I’ve learned … one of them, looks like. So here’s a reminder to myself that these are still good tunes, and if I’m looking for something new, Past Josh already picked me out something.

I didn’t see a sound level meter at any of the stages, but the volumes seemed to be mostly kept in check anyway. The times I pulled out my meter at the Fountain Lawn stage because it sounded loud, it was within the legal limit. Whether 95 dB(A) is a reasonable–rather than legal–limit is still an open question.

The Boeing Green jam tent had a wall panel on the correct side! It did seem to help a bit. Although nothing would have helped when the Duoc Su Lion Dance Team (who were great; I went and checked them out to see what the noise was) started up ~125 feet away.

The Back Porch stage’s seating area outside the beer festival fence was inadequate. And apparently inside the beer festival fence, audience members were asked to leave to make room for beer buyers. I didn’t observe that myself, but it was reported by someone at the town hall discussion. That’s not great.

The town hall discussion was a great start. I think it should have been longer, because there were plenty of people in the audience with questions or comments who didn’t get a chance to speak due to time. I hope that the organization will consider holding something like this between festivals, not just at the festival itself, because it has to be an ongoing conversation.

The town hall presentation portion really heavily emphasized the importance and value (and historical precedent) of the inclusion of many cultures at the festival. I agree that including many cultures and communities is part of what makes the Folklife Festival so unique and valuable, but I’m not sure the organization is really reaching the people they need to with this approach. I don’t think the problem is that people don’t understand the value of diversity; I think it’s that they don’t agree that it should come at the expense of their own culture’s historically large presence at the festival.

I’m talking about the contra dancers. And I say this as someone who enjoys playing for and dancing contras. Some of the people in that community are … well, one of them complained about a square dance being called by a contra caller last year. Do you really think that person is ok with the contra stage (the contra community stores, maintains, sets up, and tears down the dance floor there; they can reasonably think of that whole stage as “theirs”) being used for Zydeco or swing dancing, let alone any other culture’s folk dances the space might be used for?

I don’t know, but I suspect, that a lot of the donations of money and time that Folklife relies on are coming from the contra community. I’d love to know if Folklife is tracking that in any way. If that community is giving money to support a festival which they get to treat as their own mini-convention, then they’re at odds with the organization’s mission. And that seems like a problem, to me. I really do wonder what would happen if the message were less “inclusion is great” and more “no, seriously you guys, this is not your private festival any more”.

One audience member at the town hall stood up and gave her credentials as a fundraiser, and asked how she could get in touch with Folklife with ideas. She got the interim director’s business card, but that’s not a model for sustainable community engagement. If Folklife wants to be truly engaged with the community, they need to have a well-advertised way to contact them with ideas. And whatever form that takes, it needs to be monitored year-round, and responded to. We tried a few years back to volunteer to do some non-festival work, and once we finally got ahold of someone who would respond to email, we were told that the volunteer email address wasn’t monitored for half the year. That can’t happen, not in an organization which wants to operate year-round and emphasize how they are community-powered. Maybe it doesn’t happen any more; there’s been some turnover there.

Someone at the town hall asked whether donations were on track to keep the festival going for next year. They were, apparently, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is: what is the organization doing to ensure that its operations are sustainable without resorting to calls for emergency donations every year? If only 17% of festival attendees are giving the requested daily donation, what is the plan for if that doesn’t change? What are the plans for operating within a budget you can reasonably expect to have, not the budget you hope to get based on your call for increased donations?

One question I have along those lines is why Folklife’s IRS form 990 has shown zero revenue from inventory sales in the last few years. Maybe it’s just a reclassification of that revenue, and it’s showing up somewhere else. But my credit card receipt shows that I bought my shirt from Post Industrial Press in Tacoma, not from NW Folklife. Did they sell the merch rights, or are they just outsourcing the sales operation? I don’t know. I guess that’s a question for Chandler.

Random observation: emcee at the Mural Amphitheater stage exhorting the audience to donate so that Folklife could keep presenting all these musical styles, blues, rock, funk, uh… blues-rock. The festival is pretty balkanized, I guess.

The Massive Monkees | Arts Corps – Massive Break Challenge should be held in a bigger venue. The Cornish Playhouse is not big enough. Is it the only venue with a suitable dance stage?

Good drink selection at the beer garden in Hospitality this year. The woman operating the taps deserves a medal; was she working there the entire time?

I wish the festival didn’t feel so broken up into distinct areas, but I guess that’s inevitable with the landscaping and building changes at the Seattle Center over the years.

It felt like there were fewer buskers this year than previously.

Overall, I think things are improving. I’d like to see more transparency from the organization about what challenges they face year-round, not just a push for donations in the ramp-up to the festival. People with skills want to help. Make it easy for them to do that.

In honor of International Women’s Day, here’s a post about women who play old-time music. There’s a perception that old-time is a genre mainly for and by old white men. I’ll grant that the old-time scenes I’m aware of are awfully white, but a lot of musicians I respect are women. Here are some of them, with the only selection criteria being that they’re living and they’re the ones I thought of during my commute this morning:Continue reading “International Women’s Day, Old-Time Edition”

I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about nuclear annihilation lately. Must just be something in the air. Oh! Speaking of something in the air. Here’s a booklet from the government of 1961 about what you can do in the event of a nuclear attack. You can read about the creation of this booklet over at CONELRAD, which looks to still be a going concern, hooray! You can find them at CONELRAD.com and on Blogspot.

The Ballad of Bowling Green
(to the tune of “Granite Mills”, by Cordelia’s Dad)

‘Twas one bright day in April
and the clocks had struck thirteen
when the story I’ll relate to you
took place in Bowling Green.
Though few today have heard of it,
it was such a dreadful sight
that every true American
should join us in the fight.

Two young men fled their homeland;
they came here from Iraq.
They settled on our peaceful shores
thanks to President Barack.
They weren’t here but a moment,
when the FBI appeared
with a plan to aid mujahideen,
and the city’s fate grew near.

The young men, they accepted,
and they helped our enemies
by doing what was asked of them —
save your questions, if you please.
But did they stop there? No, oh no,
and here our story turns.
For now I can explain to you
why Bowling Green still burns.

(chorus)

Betraying our great nation,
jihadis in our midst
took growth and strength enhancers,
and claws grew from their fists.
They hacked and slashed, the blood ran red,
they slaughtered young and old.
And when they found no more to stab
they grew and grew tenfold.

Soon fire spouted from their mouths,
whole city blocks did burn.
Their fearsome eyes shot laser beams,
but the tide began to turn.
The brave boys of the CBP
arrived with tanks and planes,
and soon enough with liberal tears
they doused the burning flames.

(chorus)

Since the MSM won’t tell you
what happened next, I must.
A blinding flash, a wave of fire,
and Bowling Green was lost.
Yes, Islam nuked America,
that’s how this all began.
And that is why today there is
an immigration ban.

A friend was talking about how “the revolution needs a better PA system” this evening, because he was at a protest at Westlake, around the corner from the main area, and couldn’t hear the speaker. People in the conversation were talking about festival-grade PA systems, but it seems to me that what a protest needs is something portable and easily deployable, not something which requires AC power and a stage with rigging for flying speakers. You want to be able to move with the crowd if you’re on the march, and ideally if the march is a mile long you still want people in the back to be able to hear.

Here’s my suggestion (all links to Amazon, sorry, but everything’s available somewhere else just as easily):

ThunderPower 1200 megaphone – these suckers look to be super loud. They have a line-in jack and they can be powered by a 12v car battery, both important considerations in this application.

12v 100AH Deep Cycle AGM Battery – a beefy deep-cycle battery. I think this could power one of the megaphones for almost a full day. The down side is, it weighs 65 pounds, so you’ll need some wheels for it.

Midland GXT1000VP4 36-Mile 50-Channel FRS/GMRS Two-Way Radio – you’ll need one of these for each megaphone, plus one for the speaker. Put all the radios attached to the megaphones in receive mode, tuned to the same channel as the one the speaker talks into. Now you have a wireless distribution system for your audio. Down side: it can be jammed fairly easily, and may be illegal to use in this application, so more research is required.

Electro-Harmonix Memory Toy Analog Delay – might not be necessary, but when you’re near a PA speaker a long way from the stage, you need to add a bit of delay to that speaker in order not to get an echo effect, due to the speed of sound. Sound will travel over the radio faster than through the air, so you’ll hear something through the closest PA speaker and then again as the sound from speakers closer to the stage reaches you. Might not be as big a deal in a huge protest as it is in a live concert, but worth thinking about. (You’d want to set the blend to wet-only, no feedback, and adjust the delay until it sounded right.)

This configuration would cost under $700. You could maybe save some money by getting something like a Mackie Freeplay battery-powered PA, which weighs under 15 pounds, instead of the megaphone and deep-cycle battery. You wouldn’t need the battery charger, and you might not need the hand truck or tripod stand. I’m not sure how loud it would be compared to that megaphone, though.

Anyway, something like this is probably what I’d go with if I were going to be supplying a protest movement with sound reinforcement. If you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

What follows is a Twitter thread that I’ve reformatted because I can’t stand reading longer pieces with all the Twitter chrome, even on sites like Storify. I’ve embedded the first tweet; you can read the entire thing in its original context by clicking the date in the embedded tweed and then clicking “Show more” every time you get to the end. (I’ve added some footnotes, in addition to reformatting.)

So, here’s a thing about Trump and his competence/mental state. I’m gong to list three things that have happened since he was elected.

Thing the first – when asked about his/the GOP’s plan on ACA, he said, repeatedly, that the Democrats “own Obamacare” and its failures. He said that they “should” let it fail and the Democrats would “own it”, but they’re not going to. 1)I think she might be referring to this.

Thing the second – when he visited the CIA, he said outright that he was visiting them first to put to bed the idea of a rift with them. 2)“And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth. (Laughter and applause.) And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. And I just want to let you know, the reason you’re the number-one stop is exactly the opposite — exactly. And they understand that, too.” —source

And thing the third – he described the purpose of sweeping regulatory rollback as being to allow companies to do something “monstrous” fast. 3)“When you want to expand your plant, or when Mark wants to come in and build a big massive plant, or when Dell wants to come in and do something monstrous and special – you’re going to have your approvals really fast.” —source

These three things all have one thing in common – saying them in no way helped him, in no way advanced his case or achieved a goal. So why did he say them? I’ll tell you why. It’s the other thing they have in common: they are internal talking points. Strategy points.

Donald Trump told us he wanted the weekend off. 4)“One of the first orders I’m gonna sign – day one – which I will consider to be Monday as opposed to Friday or Saturday. Right? I mean my day one is gonna be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration” —source He had no intention of going to the CIA, or anywhere else. So how did he get there? Like so:

Someone close to him says, “Donald, you need to go talk to the CIA.”
“I don’t wanna. They’re out to get me.”
“That’s why you have to go.”

His advisor (handler) says, “The media’s talking about this rift, this rift. You have to go talk to them right away, show there’s no rift.” So Donald Trump gets up in front of the CIA and his paid cheering session, and honest to God the only thing he says on topic is that. He repeats, probably almost word for word, the rationale his advisor told him he had to be there. He doesn’t understand what they actually wanted him to do, which was to get up and praise the CIA and act like there was no rift.

The other cases? Same thing. He’s repeating to reporters the verbiage his aides and advisors explain to him why he wants to do things. It was probably Bannon the nihilist who told him that the regulatory rollback would help companies that want to do monstrous things.

My point here is – Donald Trump was never a complex or nuanced man, but at this point, he’s… well, “far gone” is the only way to put it. It’s unfortunate there is so much loaded, ableist rhetoric around both evil and incompetent men, but there is something going on here. When you read the text of a Trump interview or speech from ten years ao, compared to one today? The degradation is very obvious.

Remember the report that the Russians had prepared all this kompromat on Trump but found they didn’t need it? He just does what they say. And his close aides/associates outright saying he basically does what the last person he talked to (that he trusts) suggests. 5)“Trump tends to echo the words of the last person with whom he spoke, making direct access to him even more valuable, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal campaign discussions.” —source

I’ll put this very bluntly: I don’t think Donald Trump understands what the people in his life are telling him to do, even as he does it. If he were playing poker and Steve Bannon were helping him and Bannon said, “Donald, you’re showing an ace but you’ve got nothing, bluff”, Donald would say, “I’ve got nothing so I’m bluffing.” and then get very angry when he doesn’t win, because he was told that would work.

There are at least those three times in January alone that he has repeated what was obviously an internal talking point, to reporters. This is not to say he’s entirely a puppet president. I think he’s doing two things right now: his own impulses, and what he’s talked into. Both kinds of things are dangerous for different reasons. His unchecked id, unrestrained temperament, could literally get us all killed. And his tendency to go along with whatever the people he relies on press him into doing puts very dangerous people in powerful positions. And our supposedly “liberal media” spent ages blandly reporting on “concerns” of Clinton’s health that were clearly deflection/projection.

Mark my words, if things continue, he’s gonna pull a talking points gaffe like the ones I mentioned during an important negotiation. I’ve kept waiting for anyone in the media to notice this pattern but no one seems to be picking up on it, among the other weirdness. I’m sure to Donald it makes a kind of sense, he’s always subscribed to the idea that it’s all just “moves” in a negotiation anyway. The idea that you don’t tell the person you’re buttering up you’re there to butter them up, or reveal your scapegoat plans to the public seems to have slipped away from him, though. He’s lost what little sense of subtlety he ever had.

A scene I’d bet has happened:

Advisor: Donald, you have to say X, because Y.
Donald: So I say Y.
A: You can’t say Y.
D: But I’m president!

And then there’s a ten minute argument about why did the advisor tell him Y if he can’t say Y, why can’t he say Y if Y is true, etc. And the advisor tries to convince him that he can’t say Y because it looks bad, but that turns into Donald wanting to say THAT. And then they run out of time and the advisor gives up, figuring (mostly correctly!) that it will all be overlooked anyway.

That’s how we end up with Trump rambling about the Democrats owning Obamacare if the repeal/replace fails. That’s how we end up with Trump telling the CIA he’s visiting them first because of appearances. That’s how we end up with Trump explaining the purpose of the regulation rollback as allowing companies to do monstrous things quickly.

Now, if you think this is worrying, here’s the scary part: the people working with him in the White House and the GOP leaders must know this. And their collective reaction to this ongoing and likely spiraling state of affairs is not “This is bad.” but “What a golden opportunity!”

Tomorrow, God willing, I will wake up. And I will find Trump’s online supporters saying, “How do you know that’s what his advisors said?” And it’s true, I have no inside knowledge. It’s just conversational algebra. You start from the actual outcome and work backwards. See, with a few exceptions, people rarely say things that make no sense. You just have to figure out *how* they make sense. And while it’s tempting to dismiss what Trump spews in his rambles as “word salad”, a lot of it does make sense from the right perspective.

And I’m telling you, a lot of what he’s been doing is repeating fragments of advice he’d get from advisors, things from strategy meetings. And I have never had a high opinion of him, but I don’t believe he would have done that, ten years ago. Make of that what you will.

(That’s the end of the twitter transcript. I want to point out at the end that there are other examples, one of which she’s linked to in that last tweet: his rollback of “lock her up”, saying that it played well during the election but we don’t care about that, and his rollback of “drain the swamp”, saying it was something he didn’t want to say but the crowds loved it. These are things he actually said during his victory rallies, much to my and many others’ astonishment. The piece above goes a long way towards explaining those.)

“And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth. (Laughter and applause.) And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. And I just want to let you know, the reason you’re the number-one stop is exactly the opposite — exactly. And they understand that, too.” —source

3.

↑

“When you want to expand your plant, or when Mark wants to come in and build a big massive plant, or when Dell wants to come in and do something monstrous and special – you’re going to have your approvals really fast.” —source

4.

↑

“One of the first orders I’m gonna sign – day one – which I will consider to be Monday as opposed to Friday or Saturday. Right? I mean my day one is gonna be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration” —source

5.

↑

“Trump tends to echo the words of the last person with whom he spoke, making direct access to him even more valuable, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal campaign discussions.” —source

Prompted by a facebook post from Tony Mates, I made a word cloud of words found in old-time tune titles, proportionally sized by frequency of appearance in tunes played at the Wedgwood Alehouse Tuesday night jam session over the last few years. That’s it, above. Click on it to embiggen.

It looks like Old Little Girl Waltz is the most likely name for tune, although I’m pretty taken with “Jenny Won’t Cluck” up at the top, and “Back From Going Away” in a spiral from 8:00-ish isn’t bad, either.

I don’t quite know where I stand on wearing a safety pin as a symbol of solidarity with oppressed groups who are going to be hit the hardest by a Trump/Pence administration’s actions, or are already being hit by the actions of bigots emboldened by the election. If, somehow, you have no idea what I’m talking about, there’s a pretty good explanation over at Vox. On the one hand, yay, solidarity. On the other hand, boo, slacktivism. The most compelling (for me) case against wearing a safety pin is that you shouldn’t signal being an ally if you aren’t prepared to back that up with action.

You can get a button with the text “I will do my best to fuck up any bigot who fucks with you” or the more work-safe and pacifist text “I will do my best to stop any bigot who messes with you” (also available: pdf templates for people with their own 1″ button makers), and maybe that’s better. It loses a bit in the easily-recognized symbol department, but gains in being easily interpreted. It’d probably be a good idea to wear a Black Lives Matter button, if you’re going to be wearing buttons, and maybe a rainbow flag and ⚧ symbol, and a Star of David, and a Venus symbol with a fist in the middle, and a star and crescent, and have atheists decided on a symbol yet? There was a nice immigration reform symbol a couple of years ago, too, but I’d never come across it until just now when I went looking. Honestly, so many groups are threatened by a Trump presidency that I’m not sure you could wear a button for all of them without clanking when you walk. But just wear a pin which says “I didn’t vote for Trump”, and maybe you’re back to making yourself feel better, not actually helping anyone.

So, what to do?

One thing that has occurred to me is that there seem to be real post-election increase in hate speech and graffiti, and calls for people who wear safety pins to have a plan for how to intervene when they witness someone being attacked. But maybe you’re not willing to physically get between an attacker and their victim, for whatever reason. Maybe you just want to be a better witness. You know what’s gotten relatively cheap in the last few years? Surveillance equipment. “Lifelogging” gear such as this body camera is relatively affordable, and if you have the presence of mind to start it capturing as soon as you see something, you can help by providing a victim of an attack with evidence. Basically, it’s the consumer version of the body cameras police officers should be wearing 100% of the time.

But there’s a flaw in that style of camera, which is that you have to know in advance that you want to record something. Because they’re intended to be worn almost as jewelry, they can’t have an awful lot of battery life, so you have to do something to activate them. Chances are, if you’re just walking around and you witness an attack, you’re not going to be able to get the camera going before it’s over.

There’s a style of camera which doesn’t require that, though: vehicle dashboard cameras. You may be familiar with them from the many, many videos of Russian car crashes (and the occasional ginormous meteor burst) on youtube. They’re wired to the car electric system, they’re always running, and they just loop over old footage when they fill up the card, so you don’t have to worry about running out of space or battery life. When something happens, you push a button after the fact and save the recording that you already have of it.

I was looking at mounting systems for police body cameras yesterday, and I think it’d be pretty easy to make a shoulder mount for a dashboard camera. Get a USB battery pack on your belt and some kind of weather-resistant enclosure for a dash cam that you can wear, and you’ve got a mechanical version of Heinlein’s “Fair Witness”. There was some discussion of this sort of thing when Google Glass was a going concern, but again, Google Glass had maybe a 45 minute recording capacity on battery power. And even if you had an external battery pack for it, I don’t think there was a circular buffer to allow you to record continuously but only save the important recordings.

Newer models of GoPro camera have a circular buffer option (called “looping”, there), and the benefit of an active ecosystem of accessories including external power cases and body mounts. You could probably put together a pretty good sousveillance rig using off the shelf parts, although it’d probably be fairly expensive — GoPro gear isn’t cheap.

I really do think that automotive dashboard cameras may be the way to go, here. The Z-Edge Z3 dashcam is well-regarded and only costs $100. In its default mode it starts recording in a circular buffer as soon as you plug it into power, and has enough onboard battery to gracefully shut down when power is removed. It’s small and light, although not as small as most lifelogging cameras, and I bet it would be pretty easy to make a rugged enclosure for it out of a Pelican 1020 or something similar. Add a decent USB power pack and you could have a complete setup for under $200.

There was a ton of pushback against Google Glass wearers for being walking surveillance devices, I know. Wearing a much more visible body camera probably wouldn’t be any better. Maybe if it were accompanied by highly visible icons of watching eyes, so it was clear you weren’t trying to hide the fact that you were recording everything? Heck, maybe the eyes alone would be a good replacement for a safety pin as an icon of solidarity and implied willingness to act. “I’m watching. I see you.” There is some evidence that images of “watching eyes” encourage pro-social behavior, too. (Also, they help prevent being eaten by birds.)

I dunno, I think there might be room today for people to wear dashcams in the name of holding bigots accountable. What are your thoughts?